Post #794778 by Prikli Pear on Sat, Apr 27, 2019 9:30 PM

After a couple of years of looking for information on Corpus Christi's Lahala House and coming up empty, I scored a menu and matchbook cover within a week of each other. For posterity's sake, I share them with you here. The front of the menu:

The interior of the menu, with clipped-on bar insert.

The interior without the insert.

Detail sketch of the exterior.

Back of menu.

Detail of bar insert. I kinda wonder why they felt the insert necessary, as the bar info is printed on the back of the menu. Unless the insert wasn't actually an insert, but a stand-alone bar menu that got packaged with the menu at some point. I dunno.

The original address for Lahala House was 4922 1/2 Ave. B, but at some point in the 1960s the streets were renamed, which made it hard to pinpoint where the restaurant was actually located. Enter the matchbook cover, which must've been printed shortly before the place was destroyed by Hurricane Beulah. Gulfbreeze is the street name today, and the address places Lahala House at the northernmost point of the North Beach area, opposite what is now the U.S.S. Lexington and the Texas State Aquarium. The writeup above indicates owner Harry Porter opened a new restaurant, the Torch, following the hurricane, but a clipping I've found from the Austin American-Statesman indicates the Torch, along with the Lahala House in Austin (which became Steak Island) were both in operation by 1965.

Interior of matchbook doubled as a mini-menu. Anyone using it for such must've had good eyesight, because the print is small!

The most interesting takeaway from this is that the Lahala House didn't seem to serve tiki cocktails at all. The bar menu consists of beer and wine, with a "champagne cocktail." They have set-ups. Someone on Facebook suggested Texas' restrictive beverage laws likely played a role in limiting the drinks that could be offered. Which is a shame, but would also go a long way toward explaining why there were so very few tiki-style establishments in the state during tiki's heyday. It's hard to get into the full tiki spirit if rhum rhapsodies are a non-starter.